


Aloha 'Oe

by Nausicaa_E



Category: Lilo & Stitch (2002), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Drowning, Gen, Mostly in a hideous shattering-definitions-of-humanity sense but it's 2020, Original Statement, Queering the apocalypse, Statement Fic, The gruesome process of drowning in pollution, Transformation, we're all trans and we all want to be monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23225167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nausicaa_E/pseuds/Nausicaa_E
Summary: Statement of Lilo Pelekai, regarding an unusual creature present during her childhood. Recorded direct from subject, June 19th, 2017. Statement begins.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 81





	Aloha 'Oe

[CLICK]

[LOW BACKGROUND CHATTER – THE QUIET CONSTANT MOTION OF AN AIRPORT WAY TOO EARLY IN THE MORNING]

ARCHIVIST

 _[Muffled; the tape recorder has started from within his bag]_ Pardon me, ma’am.

LILO

 _[Muffled, suspicious of this ratty, unshaven backpacker]_ Yeah? Can I _help_ you, mister?

ARCHIVIST

 _[Muffled]_ I – I’m sorry to bother you, it’s just – I was just curious if there’s any significance behind your tattoos.

LILO

 _[Muffled]_ Oh! The question I _want_ people to ask! _[Laughs]_

[A SMALL SIGH FROM AN ARCHIVIST RELIEVED TO NOT BE EATEN YET]

LILO

 _[Still muffled]_ Yeah, it’s … hm. You want the short answer or the long answer? I can do the long answer, my flight’s not for a while.

ARCHIVIST

 _[Muffled]_ Nor mine. I – hold on. Would you mind if I record this?

LILO

 _[Muffled]_ Ooh, are you doing a podcast?

ARCHIVIST

 _[Muffled, sotto voce]_ God, I wish. _[Muffled, normal volume]_ Actually, I’m … the Archivist, for the Magnus Institute, out of London. We research … Hrm.

LILO

 _[Muffled]_ You research “hrm”? C’mon, you can tell me.

ARCHIVIST

 _[Muffled; another sigh]_ We _research_ … paranormal phenomena. The Archives collect … people’s encounters with it, and I have … I have a _feeling_ , okay?

LILO

 _[Muffled, amused]_ My tats are tripping your PKE meter?

ARCHIVIST

 _[Muffled, choking on awkwardness]_ I – I can go.

LILO

 _[Muffled]_ Fuck no! _[This isn't iTunes. She can swear.]_ I’ve _definitely_ got something for you. Lemme see that Blue Yeti, archive boy.

[SOUND OF THE ARCHIVIST DIGGING A TAPE RECORDER OUT OF HIS BAG]

ARCHIVIST

 _[Sotto voce]_ And it’s already on. Great.

LILO

A _tape_ recorder?

ARCHIVIST

Digital equipment doesn’t play nice with the paranormal.

LILO

 _Fun!_ So, like … how does this work exactly?

ARCHIVIST

I … _[Inhales]_. You give your name, and what your statement is about.

LILO

Lilo Pelekai. Let’s say this is about an … unusual creature present during my childhood.

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Lilo Pelekai, regarding an unusual creature present during her childhood. Recorded direct from subject, June 19th, 2017. Statement begins.

LILO (STATEMENT)

So I’m from Kokaua Town, Kaua’i, Hawai’i. I was about four when my parents died. This was back in 2001? It was a rainy night, visibility low … car spun out of control. My big sister, Nani, is fifteen years older than me, so she was able to take care of me, and that provided some stability, but … I wouldn’t say I had a _worse_ time than any other kid who lost their parents that young, but I definitely had a _weirder_ time.

I was the type of kid who coped with bad things by creating rituals. I had a pet fish named Pudge who I’d feed peanut butter sandwiches every Thursday, ’cause I thought he controlled the weather. It’s funny – if my parents had been killed by another driver, I’d probably have been a lot angrier as a kid, but … you can’t be _angry_ at the weather. It’s too big to notice you. All you can do is placate it.

In a similar vein, I remember being kind of obsessed with Pele back then – you know, the Hawai’ian goddess of volcanoes? Like Pudge, she was a face I could put on destruction, and unlike Pudge, she was something humanlike. Something I could make into a friend.

As the months wore on, Nani was starting to reach the end of her rope. She was having a hard time keeping a job, and a hard time being my legal guardian, and I was picking up on it, and …

June 21, 2002. That’s when everything changed.

* * *

A new social worker came around to check on me and Nani. His name, as far as I know, was Cobra Bubbles; he’d been in the CIA and was still slowly removing the stick from his ass. Nani was stressed, I was acting out, and he threatened to separate us, and Nani and I had a fight. I ended up praying for a friend, and Nani says she overheard me, which is why the next day, she took me to a dog shelter to adopt a pet.

And that’s when I met Stitch.

I was too young to really be able to tell he wasn’t a dog. He looked a lot more like a blue koala, with long, rabbity ears, sharp teeth, and a waddly gait. Like I said – I was a weird kid, and so I _had_ to have a Weird Dog. He was weird and ugly and unlovely and unloved, and I needed that as a friend.

Stitch was also not at _all_ a good pet. He caused all sorts of chaos – lost my sister a few jobs, smashed a lot of our stuff, sorta thing – because of the opposable thumbs I was too young to care about, and, honestly, because he was _kind of a dick_. But I was _determined_ , because I was _five_ , and I had the power of Pele and Elvis on my side, and we went _surfing_ in the middle of CPS terrifying me out of my five-year-old gourd, and it was _fine_.

It was not fine.

Stitch ran off that night, and when he came back in the morning, he was pursued by something even I couldn’t dismiss as normal.

* * *

Stitch wasn’t looking too hot either – his head had antennae now, and he had an extra set of arms with sharp claws – but the thing that was chasing him filled my vision. Imagine a bear with the face of a four-eyed wombat and the skin and feet of a hippo, holding the biggest damn gun you’ve ever seen. I’m sure it was terrifying in the moment – the entity destroyed my house trying to capture Stitch – but looking back, it just seems … comical. Slapstick. The gun even looks like a cheap plastic toy.

Of course, it’s that exact moment that Cobra and Nani both showed up, and he deemed her incapable of caring for me. Like, now I don’t blame him – my house was shot to shit! – but it scared the hell out of baby me, and I ran off into the forest to look for Stitch while they argued.

And then some colossal whale-man, bigger than the four-eyed bear, grabbed me and Stitch and hauled us aboard an honest-to-god spaceship.

The four-eyed bear had his own ship, and Stitch, Nani, and another alien – a one-eyed frog-skinned polyp thing – pursued us, and after a strenuous chase, rescued me. I’d describe it in more detail, but I don’t really know how to make it interesting? I was sitting in a cockpit watching chaotic events run past me, and eventually I got out of there, and we’re on the beach as a third spaceship deposits some tall gray alien with hooves. It reveals that Stitch is the four-eyed bear’s culminating experiment in creating a destructive life-form, that the others were all sent to catch him, and now he’d be taken to the big spooky space jail.

I, with my five-year-old pride and defiance, said no. Stitch was still, technically, my pet, and so if the tall alien took him away, it was breaking Earth law. Stitch made some _big_ puppy-dog eyes at it, and it let him stay with me. Apparently it also knew Cobra, who’d had previous dealings with aliens, which kind of went over my head at the time, but it tasked him with watching me and Stitch.

* * *

And the four-eyed bear – Jumba Jookiba – and the one-eyed polyp – Wendell Pleakley – stayed on, partially to help us rebuild our house with their advanced alien technology, and partially because they … liked Earth, I think. Reading between the lines, neither of them had much of a life back out in the wider galaxy, I guess? Or were there to monitor Stitch to make sure he didn’t fly off the chain again? It was crazy. But because of that craziness, my family went from me and my sister and occasionally her boyfriend to me, my sister, my sister’s boyfriend, my weird alien brother, my social worker, and my alien uncle and … I grew up referring to Wendell as an “aunt”, but I don’t think they actually have anything like a human gender.

I grew up learning a lot more than an ordinary kid would, I think. Stitch was _wicked_ smart and gave me something of an … unorthodox approach to solving problems, by which I mean he taught me how to pick locks, hotwire a car, and make a shiv. Uncle Jumba was a self-described “evil genius” and advanced alien biomedical knowledge was just … part of my everyday life, I guess. Aunt Wendell taught me about how many ways to be a person there are (which came in _really_ handy when I started dating a trans dude, among other things).

I’m not really sure why people didn’t notice the aliens in my life more often. I think it might have been something of a Men-in-Black deal, where they could fuck with others’ perceptions … it kind of reminds me of the idea of glamour in fairy tales from _your_ islands, which is appropriate, since that’s what a lot of Western alien tropes draw from.

But for me, all that was normal. I didn’t think too much about how goddamn _weird_ my life was, until I got on social media and started following science blogs.

Suddenly, I was aware of how fucking _fragile_ the world was. David and Nani fostered my lifelong love of the ocean; Cobra told me that in an ideal society, people stood up and took action. (I think that’s why he joined the CIA, and I think that’s why he left it.) I talked about this with Stitch a lot, and he always got very quiet for a moment when I broached it, like there was a solution that he had in his back pocket but never wanted to suggest.

He always kept my hopes up when I was on the edge of despair, though. When I’d see adults fail me again and again, he’d help me direct my anger, make me work twice as hard to research new things. Uncle Jumba helped me with the practical side of getting onto my marine biology track at Hilo, but Stitch kept me from giving up.

Surprisingly – or maybe not that surprisingly, but surprisingly to _me_ – the way Stitch helped me do conservation work had nothing to do with academics, and everything to do with making me realize how weird my life was.

* * *

Stitch hated water. Little guy was incredibly dense, too dense to float or even swim. But he had fun on my surfboard, or Nani or David’s, once he really started to trust our skills. I think surfing made his fear safe for him the way Pudge made my fear of rain safe.

So, it’s … last fall. October 23rd, a laid-back Sunday afternoon. I’m planning to hit the waves with my best alien bud for a bit before we head back to campus and grab dinner before my Elvis show on URH.

And I make a mistake.

I surf away from the main beach. I head out a ways around the cape, ride some wild waves … and wipe out. That in and of itself isn’t bad – everyone wipes out now and again, I’m a strong swimmer, and Stitch always wears a life vest. What _is_ bad is that I’ve found an illegal outflow pipe, and it’s scalding my skin, and I panic, and then it’s scalding my lungs and I’m drowning and I’m fighting for the surface and I’m losing.

My memory of drowning isn’t clear. I don’t think I’ve ever been scared of drowning; the sea’s always been too friendly to me. What I remember is the clutching fear of water gone _wrong_ , of a life-giving fluid turned only into death – and the clawing knowledge that this was happening _here_ , that of _course_ being a US state didn’t prevent us from being one more tropical paradise where rich white people dumped their garbage, that I was _stupid_ to try and fight the awful machinery of colonialism and industrialism as it _physically invaded my lungs_ …

And that’s when I saw a small shape, plummeting through the water towards me. Stitch was sinking like a stone, life vest discarded, eyes totally calm. I saw myself reflected in his eyes, and I looked stretched, warped, inhuman … and alive.

We didn’t talk. We didn’t need words as he pried open my mouth with all four arms and shoved his head inside, distending my cheeks impossibly painlessly. He tasted medicinal as he slithered down my tongue, thick enough in my throat that I would have gagged if I wasn’t already drowning.

He never reached my stomach. This hot, sickly feeling pervaded my body … and then I swallowed, and Stitch was gone, and a clear-eyed marine biology student was gone, and then there was just me, and my gill slits, impervious to the water-gone-wrong.

It felt … _electrifying_. Like, I’m not trans, and I feel kind of weird using this analogy, but … I held my boyfriend’s hand when he did his first T-shot, and I think I must have looked the way he looked, that awful joy that spread across his face even as he winced with pain? That magical feeling of becoming something _different_ , something _other_ , something _more_ … something all those naysayers back home would _never_ let you accomplish, something that wouldn’t even fit in their puny little concept of _humanity_.

* * *

I’ve thought a lot about that moment, in the past several months. I thought about it as I huddled in a towel on the beach, looking at the blue patterns spreading across my arms and legs. I thought about it the next week as I swam back to that outflow pipe, traced it to its source, and used every scrap of Uncle Jumba’s knowledge and Stitch’s ingenuity to reach into the walls and _twist_ that edifice of pipes and wires and slowly dripping chemicals into something that would turn that waste inward. I thought about it when the company claimed they were shutting down operations in Hilo, and made no mention of the twisted things the managers had become, swimming free and beautiful and filtering out the poisons from the sea. I thought about it every time I assisted my professors’ research, and I could _see_ significant results that I could use to _push_ them towards knowledge of how to _remake_ the biosphere into something hardy enough to put up with our trash, and I could _see_ how humans were the best-equipped to process our own waste if only we were willing to _suck it up_ and make a little _change_. I thought about it when my boyfriend was crying on my shoulder and I didn’t have enough arms to hug him with and then I _did_ , and I was _enough_ , and we would be _okay_.

LILO

 _[Yawn]_ That’s about it, really! Whoo. Load off _my_ chest. Thanks for listening, archive boy!

ARCHIVIST

That’s … surprisingly human. Compared to some of the others, at least …

LILO

_[Laughs, growing in intensity and depth]_

ARCHIVIST

What’s so funny?

LILO

You missed the whole _point_ of my “tattoos”, archive boy! I’m _not_ human anymore!

[THE UNSETTLINGLY AWFUL SOUND OF LILO GROWING TEETH, SCALES, AND FANGS, WHICH WILL DRIVE ALEX BONKERS TRYING TO CREATE]

LILO

 _[Voice turning into a guttural growl]_ And It. _Doesn’t. MATTER._

[NOISES OF A HORRIFIED ARCHIVIST]

LILO

 _[Guttural, layered over herself in a high and a low register]_ I can be _just_ as well off _without_ humanity. I can eat and breathe and sleep and fight and flee and fuck and live and laugh and _love_ from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the moon with _none_ of the shackles of your _civilization_ , of your sense of identity as a _species_ , of the cold, unfeeling scientific _method_ that reduces _everything_ to numbers and interactions. Whatever _you_ do with your _tapes_ and your _stories_ , _[mockingly] archive boy_ , is pretty close to whatever _I_ do.

_[Indrawn breath, faint chuckle]_

_[Guttural voice and layering continues]_ But _you_ – you still _cling_ to your idea of _statements_ , of a supernatural _experience_ that falls into place with a nice, pretty _moral_ , even if that’s just “things are _scary_ sometimes”. I don’t need _any_ of the stories you tell yourself.

 _[Lilo’s guttural, layered voice is suddenly much louder, closer to the tape recorder]_ And _neither_. _Do. You._

[ARCHIVIST WHIMPERS FAINTLY]

[THE EQUALLY AWFUL SOUND OF LILO RETRACTING INTO SOMETHING THAT COULD PASS FOR HUMAN]

LILO

 _[Laughs] Woooooooow!_ That was … _mm_. _[Chef’s kiss noise]_ You’re a funny guy, archive boy. Hoo!

 _[Lilo leans in closer to the tape recorder again, and continues in an affected, cutesy voice like one would use when talking to a pet]_ Do you want a moral? Audience want a treat, _hmm?_ Let me see …

How’s _this_.

Aliens aren’t trying to _invade_ our world. They just want us to _join_ them. It’s like my dad said, before he died …

 _‘ohana_ means family, and family means _nobody_ gets left behind.

[CLICK]

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks a bunch to my partner Elysian and my QPP Ripley for helping me develop the concept of "haha what if Lilo & Stitch is about the Extinction". Thanks a bunch to the Extinction for driving the Down With Cis bus.


End file.
